Gracie left her alley for love
QUESTION Why did Gracie Fields move to
California in 1940?
Blessed with a superb soprano voice, Gracie Fields found international stardom despite her humble beginnings, having been born over a fish and chip shop in Rochdale in 1898.
But during World War II, she left her beloved lancashire because of love.
she started her career in 1915 with a travelling troupe promoted by comedian and impresario Archie Pitt, whom she married in 1923.
Gracie’s debut film, 1931’s sally In Our Alley, featured her signature song sally, Pride Of Our Alley, and made her a star.
The year 1939 was tough for Gracie. she divorced Pitt after seven years of separation and was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
When she travelled to Capri to recuperate, by her side was Monty Banks, the Italian director of four of her movies: shipyard sally, Keep smiling, We’re Going To Be Rich and Queen Of Hearts. He nursed her through her illness and they married in 1940.
during the war, Gracie enlisted in ENSA, the entertainment National service Association, and toured europe to entertain the troops.
during November 1939, she played a number concerts in France despite still being weak. They were broadcast by the BBC as ‘ behind enemy lines’. At the Apollo theatre in lens, she sang I’m sending A letter To santa Claus and had herself and the audience in tears.
Back home, Gracie faced a major dilemma. The journalist lord Castlerosse told her that as Monty was Italian, he would become an enemy alien if he remained in Britain once Italy joined forces with Germany.
‘I told him Monty wasn’t a fascist, but with urgency he told me that it didn’t matter and that they’d put my beloved little Monty inside a clink, a prison camp, and behind barbed wire unless I managed to get him away,’ she said.
The couple left for Quebec aboard the frigate the duchess of Bedford on May 30, 1940 — Italy joined the war 11 days later. From Canada, the couple moved to Hollywood, where Gracie had a film contract for £23,000 (worth £900,000 today) with Twentieth Century Fox.
several biographies record a secret meeting between Gracie and Winston Churchill in which he encouraged her to go and earn dollars for her country.
But as her biographer sebastian lassandro points out, this was probably invented as an excuse for leaving Britain in wartime. There is no record of a meeting and Gracie did not mention it.
she was vilified by the Press for deserting her country, though she spent the war touring and fund-raising. With Monty, she clocked up more than 30,000 miles and raised £250,000 for the war effort.
Monty designed la Canzone del Mare (The song of the sea), Gracie’s beloved home and restaurant on Capri.
He died, aged 52, in his wife’s arms aboard the Orient express crossing northern Italy, on January 7, 1950.
In February 1979, Gracie was made a dame seven months before her death on Capri, aged 81. In 2016, her statue was unveiled at Rochdale Town Hall.
Charles Beith, Preston, Lancs.
QUESTION Aged nine, I built a crystal set with a 100 ft aerial up a tree and a 50 ft earth buried in the ground. If I rigged it up today, would it work?
THE short answer is ‘Yes’. The long, medium and short wave frequency bands on which crystal sets work are still in use for broadcasts and can be detected using this most basic type of receiver.
A tuned circuit is the vital ingredient of any radio set. It contains just two components, an inductor and capacitor. By adjusting the inductance, the capacitance or both, you can adjust the radio frequency that is detected. In a crystal set, the aerial acts as part of the inductor and is of a fixed length, while the capacitance of the crystal is varied to select the frequency detected.
The band of frequencies that can be detected is narrow, limited by the amount by which the crystal can be varied.
Presumably, the 100 ft aerial was specified in the instructions for the set because, in conjunction with the capacitor, it provided a frequency range where plenty of signals could be detected.
The name crystal set was because a piece of mineral was used in its construction — often galena, a form of lead sulphide. [People also called these simple radios ‘cat’s whisker sets’ because of the thin, sensitive wire used in tuning them by touching points on the crystal].
The sets were popular with hobbyists because they required no external power source, which also made them safe for children to use.
Once a frequency has been tuned, it is fed into a detector that removes the radio frequency, leaving behind only the varying amplitude of the signal in the form of a varying voltage, which is fed into the headset or earpiece. Tuning is a matter of adjusting the capacitor until a voice or music can be heard.
The encoding of information onto a radio frequency, known as modulation, is achieved by varying the signal’s amplitude (AM) or its frequency (FM). A crystal set can be used to detect only AM signals.
Robert Sutherland, Edinburgh.
QUESTION Did post-war New Towns replace villages with the same names?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, not all New Towns had a nearby railway. Basildon had a railway line running through it, but no station until 1978.
The original idea for New Towns was that people would live and work in the same community, so a station was not needed. But with london only 30 miles away, higher wages could be earned that more than compensated for the cost of commuting and for the irritation of having to travel to the next station down the line at laindon.
Future Carry On star Joan sims, the essex stationmaster’s daughter, used to entertain the commuters.
Richard Brown, Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex.
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